How is it like being a DPS?

[givemeraptors]

Perfection

You have got my upvote.

[Itseotle]

*snip*

This is a really good summery. I've been playing Dragoon since release, and am currently progressing coil turn 8 (high-end game) and I have so much fun playing my class, but it is work as well. Karilyn hit a lot of excellent points, especially about the strive for improvement. As a Tank or Healer, as long as your doing your job correctly, there is very little room for improvement. You won't tank better because your standing five more feet to the left, and you won't heal any better simply by buffing "better", but as a DPS there are hundreds of little details that you could do to improve your role in the group. For example, say your tank also has a tendency to pull a mob a certain direction. You as a DPS can learn to anticipate his movements so you can maintain your uptime and not lose any DPS. Another example is learning boss rotations and knowing the duration of your own cooldowns and abilities in relation in order to maximize uptime. For example, as DRG, my Blood for Blood usually comes up about 20 seconds before Heart Phase on Titan. In this fight, even though we are supposed to "spam" our cooldowns, I know to hold onto it because Titan will be un-attackable before the buff wears off. Its just full of many tricks in order to be a better player.

[Megido]

As someone who has tanked for 12 years, who is just playing a DPS for the first time, I really really really feel this is wrong. Especially in this game, tanks tend to have less mechanics to deal with than DPSers and Healers do, and generally feel like the most forgiving of mistakes of the three roles due to having the most HP and healers prioritizing healing you, even with the incoming boss melee damage. You take avoidable damage as a tank, you'll get healed first; you take avoidable damage as a DPS, better hope the healer finds time for you before the next unavoidable damage comes.

lol
You take avoidable damage as a tank and you die and wipe the raid. You take avoidable damage as a dps, you run around and get healed after a second or two, while the healers and tanks are praying you can manage to avoid another avoidable aoe within that 2 second window.

And if you didnt, here's a res. There's only 2 more left now.

/provoke

[Karilyn]

lol
You take avoidable damage as a tank and you die and wipe the raid.

I've played a tank for 12 years across multiple games; that whole "Oh no it's so scary the boss is attacking me, I have to be so much tougher than everyone else" bullshit isn't going to work on me like it does on a lot of DPSers. I know that bullshit, I used to play that line too. But the reality is, the most recent boss I'm aware of in any MMO that was a serious test of tank survivability was Brutallus, 6 fucking years ago. Blizzard's Wrath of the Lich King ushered in an era of easy tanking, and every other MMO has crumpled before Blizzard's design philosophy regarding tanks, including FF14 (My god threat is so piss easy, why is threat so piss easy?).

But about FF14 specifically:

On most fights, avoidable damage as a tank is surprisingly eatable due to having A LOT more HP, dodge, and defense, and tanks receiving priority healing. You're the only player who has Adloquium cast on you (and usually the only player with Regan too; don't forget, Regan is 3 times stronger than Medica II's HoT), so you get a shield twice as large as anyone else, and that's without Adloquium critting, and that shield is further affected by your higher damage reduction.

It also doesn't hurt that you take less damage from unavoidable damage. I just grabbed a video from Youtube of Titan Extreme healed by Double White Mages to use as a benchmark:

Titan's Ultimate: Earthen Fury
No Scholar, No Shields, No Damage Reduction Buffs on any player

Class      | MaxHP -> CurHP = Damage = HP Loss
----------------------------------------------
White Mage |  4395 ->  978  =  3417  =  77.8%
Paladin    |  6883 -> 4713  =  2170  =  31.5%
Warrior    |  8818 -> 6091  =  2727  =  30.9%
White Mage |  4627 -> 1381  =  3246  =  70.2%
Black Mage |  4337 -> 1414  =  3165  =  73.0%
Bard       |  5105 -> 1536  =  3691  =  72.3%
Dragoon    |  5014 -> 1402  =  3702  =  72.5%
Monk       |  4828 -> 1489  =  3339  =  69.2%

And take a wild guess who was the only player in the raid with Regan on her?

I mean damn, the Tanks could've taken a theoretical three fucking simultanious Ultimates without dying. The next most durable character in that raid would've been sitting at -5189HP (-107.5% HP). The least durable character at -5856HP (-133.2% HP). Every other character would've died TWICE before the tanks died even once.

And all this STILL comes into play before factoring in Regan, Adloquium, and having a dedicated healer 90% of the time to babysit you.

And that sorta ridiculous damage reduction applies to tanks eating avoidable damage too. Most bosses in this game do NOT melee remotely close to hard enough to make most avoidable damage the same sorta threat to a tank that it is to DPSers. The only avoidable damage that'll insta-fuck you as a tank is the same avoidable damage that will insta-fuck DPS (lolLandslide)

If you still don't believe me, consider this: The prevailing strategy on Titan Extreme is that if a Bomb Boulder spawns on top of the tank, that SHE SHOULD SIT THERE AND EAT IT. BECAUSE THE TANK CAN EAT IT WITHOUT RISK OF DEATH AND NOBODY ELSE CAN.

You take avoidable damage as a dps, you run around and get healed after a second or two, while the healers and tanks are praying you can manage to avoid another avoidable aoe within that 2 second window.

And if you didnt, here's a res. There's only 2 more left now.

/provoke

DISCLAIMER: As I am a tank of 12 years, not a healer of 12 years (and additional disclaimer: I'm kinda awful at healing), I'm less confident on this specific subject, but I'll tackle it anyway... If I'm wrong a healer can correct me.

*takes a deep breath* Here we go!

In case you were unaware, to heal a DPS who took avoidable damage, you usually have to not heal someone else. On a fight like Titan you can use an AOE heal because the arena is small and players are stacked. On other fights players spread out or run around more which means the healer may be forced to use a single target heal. Nothing like 2 DPS on opposites sides of an Arena taking damage, the tank needing healing too, and unavoidable damage is coming in 3-4 seconds.

And if you didnt, here's a res. There's only 2 more left now.

This attitude is toxic and the reason behind 90% of wipes in PUGs. DPSers dropping like flies is unacceptable. It's stressful to healers. It takes healing away from players who aren't dying. Healers might have to wait for a gap in damage to Raise, resulting in a substancial DPS loss. And after you're raised, you STILL have to be healed back up, further taking healing away from other players who need it.

And in case you didn't notice, you can Swiftcast-Raise tanks too, and if a tank DOES die, guess who's getting priority Raise without delay while the other tank Provokes the boss? (Okay shit like that doesn't work on fights where both tanks are tanking different things, but that's beside the point). Healers don't wait for a gap in damage to Raise a Tank like they do to Raise a DPS.

There's a reason why so many DPSers are so fucking horrible. Because statements like yours are giving players permission to be bad, excusing their poor behavior, saying it doesn't matter. Then people wonder why they can't find DPS that doesn't suck. The first step to improving the DPS population is shattering the myth that DPSing is so easy and doesn't matter WTF you do as long as you're a warm body. Because it was true back in Everquest or Molten Core, but it isn't fucking true anymore, and all you have to do is go wipe in PUGs for an hour and count the number of wipes which were caused by shitty DPS, and the falsehood of the myth becomes as plain as day.

There's a reason I bolded and underlined this statement:

DPSing is probably the hardest role in this game, unless the DPSers are playing their role as if it was the easiest role in the game, in which case Healing becomes the hardest role in the game.
Whether healing is harder or easier than DPSing seems to come down almost exclusively to whether or not the DPSers are taking their job seriously.

[Kirinichibon]

DPS all the way until the very end game is a cake walk. Raiding DPS, depending on the fight mechanic's role, can be either boring, stressful, or super fun...or some combination.

[subteraneanbird]

I disagree with the assertion that DPS is the hardest role, for multiple reasons. While I agree with you on the part that healers generally focus on the tank, that doesn't mean "not getting hurt" is specific to DPS. Healers can't get hurt either and unlike yall I have way less methods of avoiding this. I have zero positionals like Jumps or Shoulder Tackle or Repelling Shot or Aetherial Manipulation. I don't have any off-GCD ways to recover from a mistake like Life Surge or Second Wind or Featherfoot or Foresight, except for Benediction which is on a 5 minute cooldown and has a delay more significant than most other skills. Additionally, as you yourself helped demonstrate, my vitality and defenses are the worst across the board. I have much less room for error and much fewer ways to fix those errors than any other role. And I can't necessarily just heal myself after, because that also pulls heals away. I think your understanding of triage (a skill that only incredible healers master, and one that takes a long time) boils down to "tank first, DPS last" which is frankly incredibly ignorant. There are times when it ISN'T safe to get off the tank, but I HAVE to heal other people. I have to make that sort of decision a lot, and trust that my tank is competent enough to understand my situation and act accordingly. And surprise, not many of them do because they don't play healers.

Another point is this: DPS can coast, healers can't. Unless there's a Big Ass DPS Check in your face at that very moment, you can be doing the most inane ineffective shit nearly constantly, and because of your low visibility (there are many more DPS than healers, it is harder to notice+easier to explain away low damage vs low heals or low threat) you're not likely to ever get called out. I've seen DPS who stand around and spam singular moves over and over, or not even that. Sometimes they don't even bother to auto attack. Does that mean they're good? Absolutely not. But with how fights in this game are tuned, many fights are still handily won despite that setback. If I perform an equivalent action (like using medica 2, waiting for it to tick out, using it again) in most cases the run is already over because that is ridiculously useless. Both groups have lulls and spikes in activity, but my lulls are shorter and even during them I'm expected to do more. I have more responsibility and less people to carry me through them.

I also hold contention with "rotations are hard" because there's a lot in your favor with them. Maybe I'd believe you if you had to scour through Eorzea, fighting beings most foul to get your hands on a Tomestone that says "After Impulse Drive, follow up with Disembowel!" but that's not the case. Even if you're incapable of putting rotations together yourself given the info the game gives you, other people have already and once you verify their numbers are right and it is a good rotation, it entirely becomes rote memorization and pushing a sequence of buttons with very little to interrupt you. The major interruptions I can think of (ie, not avoidable damage because that usually stops you for a few seconds at most) are adds (in which case the response is "do your rotation" or "do your other rotation, you know, the one that hits more things") or the boss just leaves for a bit (in which case the response is to come onto S-E Forums and yell about fix levi ex pls because my numberz). Healers don't have the advantage of a rotation. We have to play the entire fight by ear, having a vague knowledge of what happens next. Maybe I'm expecting a fairly weak hit on the tank and take that moment to heal the party. But whoops. Critical! Shieldbro Mcmeatwall suffered a whole lot of extra damage! Now I have to, at that moment, re-evaluate my actions. I have to do this constantly. I don't get the privilege of knowing my next action most of the time, like rotation users do. I can't plan ahead nearly as easily. Even the non-rotation based DPS (bard and summoner) use a priority system that amounts to what I do as a healer, but with less punishment for making a mistake (a lower DPS vs a player death or even a wipe).

Even socially healers are at the bottom. DPS have their DPS Solidarity. Due to the high numbers of them, bad ones can easily congregate together and stick up for each other. I've seen runs where multiple DPS played and behaved horribly and when called out defended each other. Even though the DPS population means they're fairly expendable, it also means that any baddie can yell about how they're the victim and have a whole chorus to back them up. Tanks on the other hand, enjoy enormous social power. They have near instant queues. They have the most say in parties, because "tanking is hard" (even though several of us here know that isn't the case), and also due to their relative rarity. Healers get none of that. We have decent queue times, yes, but people aren't afraid to pick fights with us because we're easier to find and because there's more people who think they understand healing without actually doing it than any other role. Hell, even when we act out we're treated differently. Tanks and DPS are often seen as masculine, either being a tough strong guy by standing up to people, or at least given the dignity of being acknowledged as assholes. What do healers get? We get to be called princesses (a very popular word on this very forum) or drama queens. We're not given any sort of respect. Everyone thinks they know our job. Everyone thinks that our complaints, valid or not, are us being drama queens.

Am I saying DPS is easy? Nope. What I'm saying is everything you claim makes DPS hard is either 1) actually not or 2) harder on healers. Just like a DpS, I have to keep my output at a good consistent level, except with less room for execution errors, bigger punishments for making mistakes, less tools to help me perform my job, less longevity ( a DPS who runs out of MP/TP will lose a lot of output, but a lower DPS output is recoverable, hence partly why summoners are first in line for raise. A stark drop in healing output is often a slow agonizing wipe), less social power, less understanding from other people. I acknowledge that playing as a top DPS is challenging. So is playing a top healer. Maybe you're thinking I sound a bit bitter. I am a bit bitter! I have every right to be! I have spent my entire time playing this game, taking on an incredibly challenging role. I've learned a lot, practiced a lot, become legitimately good. I've worked my ass off to get where I am. I'm not a top healer. I'd rate myself in the "pretty good" area at best. And the amount of effort it took to get me this far is astronomical. So, excuse me for being a bit tired of hearing the same trite shit over and over. About how I'm an over-glorified tank babysitter. About how hard it is to learn a rotation QQ. About how "I can't eat damage" when I ALSO can't but at the same time am expected to pick up after you when you do mess up. About how I'm frequently expected to help pass DPS checks because someone's AFK or just spamming Full Thrust. About how i'm playing what I genuinely think is an incredibly challenging (but rewarding) role, and getting nothing but shit for it. I'm sick and tired of people thinking they know the challenges I and other healers face without once having been in our shoes. Healing is legitimately tough. You have pressures equal to or greater than the other roles, with none of the fringe benefits. Frankly I'd state that healing is by far the toughest role, and people who pretend otherwise either don't know better or are intentionally being dishonest for whatever reason.

But, beyond that big ass rant, here is what being a DPS is like: It's pretty alright. It can be boring sometimes (bigger waits, often a simplistic sequence to push where Yoshida pops out of the screen and tells you to hit C for double damage, not a whole lot of investment in what's happening unless there's a big glowing Kill This Now event happening) but it'll push you in certain ways that the other roles won't. What it isn't is incredibly difficult. There's a fair amount of challenge yes, but a lot of it is negated by knowing all the tools at your disposal, which is graciously provided by plenty of online resources, including this very forum. "Not being a dummy" could be a second part to that, but many DPS do their role at an acceptable level while failing that, so maybe not. I've said my piece on this matter.

[Krr]

Let's all count the number of fights we've won with that one dragoon mashing Full Thrust uncomboed. Or in spite of that Bard who thinks he's hot stuff and can judge the rest of the party's performance while underclocking by over 50%. Let's count the number of real wipes that causes in an encounter.

Let's call count the number of fights we've won with that one White Mage only spamming Medica and hollering "SHROUD IS AN AGGRO MANAGEMENT TOOL" while out of MP with a tank dying. Let's count the number of real wipes that were caused by two idiot scholars stepping on each others' toes with Adloquium while neglecting an OT or the rest of the party or even each other while their Eos' spam unmicroed Fey Illumination right on top of each other.

Talk about skill ceilings all you want, but healing has the highest skill floor in the game. Until top level content, DPS can coast and all tanks need to know is to press 1-2-3 and not drive the mob car directly into the party.

[Sygmaelle]

As a Tank or Healer, as long as your doing your job correctly, there is very little room for improvement.

Its quite the opposite. Havin an extremely aware and dps oriented healer combined with a tank that isn't afraid to drop his shield oath, lower his hp and all the like, that are able to do speed runs is quite the most demanding thing.

Knowin all the ways to prevent X damage from X attack from every single boss in this game while dpsin all the time, jugglin but not too much with the life of your tank is pretty harder than just optimisin your movement / rotation / buff usage on a melee character

There's MORE buffs to use on healers. There's MORE to consider at any given time, than just blood for blood and internal release + usin your escape tool if you need to.

There's a lot more down to timing your shit properly as a healer while beein able to stance dance like a champ. It is harder than dpsing.

And I definitely recommend to actively play both so any player do know a fight in its integrity so he can be aware of how to be a part of a very fluid fight / not havin tunnel vision which is crucial.

Best part is : when you re good at healin and dpsin, you ll be an awesome tank too. Period.

[Pooky_Pasha]

DPSing is probably the hardest role in this game, unless the DPSers are playing their role as if it was the easiest role in the game, in which case Healing becomes the hardest role in the game.
Whether healing is harder or easier than DPSing seems to come down almost exclusively to whether or not the DPSers are taking their job seriously.

I find this statement laughable, simply because all roles in this game are extremely easy if you 1) have decent hand-eye coordination, 2) understand the mechanics of your job, 3) understand the mechanics of the fight, and 4) can put 1-3 together into a complete package. Being bad a role doesn't make the role harder than the others. It's usually just because that person is bad at that job, while they could excel at another job with a different role.

[Karilyn]

Talk about skill ceilings all you want, but healing has the highest skill floor in the game.

I can definitely agree with that, though I feel a ton of that is just due to lazy DPSers. Every now and then I'll heal a group where all the DPSers aren't taking avoidable damage, and I could almost fall asleep with how easy it is. Healing's difficulty feels very very strongly tied to how much everyone else sucks or doesn't suck. By a very wide margin.

Until top level content, DPS can coast and all tanks need to know is to press 1-2-3 and not drive the mob car directly into the party.

For the most part, I'm only talking top level content. Minimum of Extreme Modes and First Coil, and maybe Ultima Weapon Hard. I feel it's poor judgement to discuss a class based on how it performs at low levels, unless it's specifically being requested, and I don't think OP was asking for that. So yeah for all my posts, unless stated otherwise, I'm talking about top level content, because that's really the only content where difficulty makes any difference. I'm also comparing what a good player of one class has to do relative to a good player of another class. Not about the ability of one class to carry other people who are sucking; at high level I make a reasonable assumption that you're trying to group up with others who are performing at least acceptably basic competency. So "that one dragoon mashing Full Thrust uncomboed" doesn't really play into my argument because frankly at that point, you might as well be 7 manning the dungeon. I don't think it's unreasonable to ask basic competency out of players, and chose to never again associate with players who can't manage at least a basic copy+paste rotation off of the Internet and avoid at least 80% of random shit flying around in fights. That's sorta, my bare bones minimum tolerable play, and thus anything worse than that doesn't figure into my considerations as I'll never play with such people more than once.

Sooooooo... Yeah... but I'll discuss low level stuff anyway. At low level stuff, DPS can coast the most, that's true. But especially as a Scholar, unless you're dealing with the most supreme ungodly idiocy you can just AFK your way through stuff with Fairy healing. Even as a White Mage, 90% of the time I'm just three button healing. Focus Target Cure Macro, Medica, and occasional Esuna. Unless I'm stuck with some extreme nonsense like a tank in something like Stone Vigil wearing level 20 Scalemail, I just don't have to pay attention because nothing is ever at serious risk of dying. Below level 50, as long as every character is wearing gear remotely appropriate for their level, there isn't a class in the game that can't coast through dungeons borderline AFK; tanks, healers and DPS alike. And even after 50, the first thing that presents even an iota of challenge is Ultima Weapon Hard.

Maybe pre-50, tanking is /slightly/ harder than DPS, but that's only because you have to /gasp/ press the tab key inbetween your single target attacks every once in a while if you're not a Warrior. So it's really like saying cream puffs are harder than marshmallows. It's only correct in the most technical of sense, but both are still faceroll coasting easy, and so is healing if nobody is mindblowingly undergeared. Healing is probably harder than both at low levels, but ehhhhhhhh it's still easy. You just have the highest capacity of the 3 rolls to carry the fuck out of extraordinarily bad players; then and only then does low level healing become difficult.

Starting around Ultima Weapon Hard is really where DPSing and Healing starts to become very noticeably harder than tanking, in such a way that you'd have to be incredibly ignorant of what Healers and DPS need to do if you think tanking is harder. And at that point, Healing difficulty increases logarithmically as the DPSers perform worse and worse, starting off somewhat easier than DPSers if DPS is performing perfectly, and becoming far far far harder, to outright impossible, if DPS is getting hit by too much shit.

I think your understanding of triage (a skill that only incredible healers master, and one that takes a long time) boils down to "tank first, DPS last" which is frankly incredibly ignorant. There are times when it ISN'T safe to get off the tank, but I HAVE to heal other people. I have to make that sort of decision a lot, and trust that my tank is competent enough to understand my situation and act accordingly. And surprise, not many of them do because they don't play healers.

EDIT: Subteraneanbird, I decided to fully address the second half of your post, dealing with the social elements, in an entire separate post, because I feel you deserve to be listened to and that half is a wildly different subject than what I addressed in the rest of this post, and you DESERVE to have a post entirely dedicated to being listened to the social problems. The rest of this post is only going to address the purely mechanical elements; if you don't care about that, you can skip to my next post, where I spend less time explaining and more time listening.

That's entirely 100% reasonably fair. I am a /bad/ healer. It is a skill I have always struggled with, and thus I admitted I didn't know what I was talking about for a healer's perspective. I can accept that healers sometimes are forced to unsafely heal others besides the tank. I don't think this necessarily invalidates my statement that DPS playing badly makes a healer's job more difficult, as it is my understanding that DPSers playing badly would force you to make such difficult decisions on a more frequent basis. And that DPSer sloppy play has a very powerful (albeit indirect) influence on the outcome of a fight due to forcing healers to make such decisions more often. But I fully and openly admit my shallow understanding of healing, and bow to your greater knowledge and skill and authority on the subject.

As a tank I would be especially interested in any tips in this regard. I know I'm inclined to throw extra cooldowns on myself if the raid as a whole is taking a ton of damage, or a DPSer needs to be raised. I'm not exactly sure what other things as a tank I can do to help a taxed healer other than that, and am fully open to any tips in that regard.

you can be doing the most inane ineffective shit nearly constantly, and because of your low visibility (there are many more DPS than healers, it is harder to notice+easier to explain away low damage vs low heals or low threat) you're not likely to ever get called out

I tend to stare at the party's health bars more than is healthy to do as a tank; in part because there's SOOOO few things for me to do while tanking, so the low visibility thing is something you can never really get away with in a raid of mine. That's part of why I'm so insistent on how many wipes are caused, at the very least indirectly, by DPSers taking too much damage, and overtaxing healers. Healers are mortals too, they shouldn't be expected to carry DPSers through sloppy play. Raiding is a team effort, and asking DPSers to put in a tiny bit more effort, so that Healing's difficulty drops to sane levels, is very reasonable.

Besides, staring at party health bars helps me be able to give better, more custom fitted advice to individuals who are struggling with specific mechanics; I feel that discussing with individuals specific things they are struggling with, is more beneficial than a vague generic raid-wide "Do better, I know you can, I believe in you, one more time guys!" Square please nerf threat and throw more mechanics for tanks to deal with so I can AFK less please even though I know it'll never happen. Shit's so easy I'm tired of falling asleep at the keyboard.

I also hold contention with "rotations are hard" because there's a lot in your favor with them. Maybe I'd believe you if you had to scour through Eorzea, fighting beings most foul to get your hands on a Tomestone that says "After Impulse Drive, follow up with Disembowel!" but that's not the case. Even if you're incapable of putting rotations together yourself given the info the game gives you, other people have already and once you verify their numbers are right and it is a good rotation, it entirely becomes rote memorization and pushing a sequence of buttons with very little to interrupt you.

I hold contention with this, though I might be biased because I play Black Mage. At least for Black Mages, it's only not-hard if you aren't min-maxing out your damage; the theoretical maximum DPS is delightfully difficult to achieve, and I'm highly attracted to the skill challenge involved in it. More than just that, Umbra Ice and Astral Fire are so bizarre that, while I eventually managed through extensive research to wheedle out the best rotations, and double-check the math myself, there's still an insane amount of misinformation on both Reddit and these forums, and even in major popular guides, with the correct information often harder to find (dat spreadsheet, so sexy).

Probably the worst is the endless posts on this forum and Reddit where people claim that the best AOE rotation is Astral 3 then Fire II until you're low mana then Flaring and transposing, even though the math has been endlessly laid out showing that it's by a wide margin superior to immediately Flare into Transpose, ignoring Fire II entirely, and only Fire IIing as your Spell Speed will allow when Transpose is on Cooldown and not a single Fire II more. Even just posting this paragraph will probably cause at least one person to angrily reply, insisting that Fire IIing all your mana is superior. And all that ignores the Mana Tick Double Flare Glitch, that maybe 10% of Black Mages know about and even fewer do. You can probably click through every single "Is my Black Mage Rotation correct?" and see 2-4 people per thread insisting on the Fire II AOE rotation, even though we have the Ultimate Black Mage Resource thread on this very forum. It's ridiculous. I'll go through a thread, even on this forum, and see 70% of the people in the thread advocating suboptimal rotations.

As for the deliciously skill-challenging min-maxy persuit of theoretical max DPS... that basically factors in a ton of bizarre mana-tick min-maxing you can do. The Mana Tick Double Flare Glitch is fun and all (And it certainly adds some fun skill to see how accurately and consistently you can count out 2.25 seconds, within an accuracy range that has to be hit of about a quarter second. It's harder than you think, especially when dodging deadly things, and especially factoring in that the 2.25 seconds doesn't start from the end of your spellcast but at the next mana tick, which is variable.). But there's even more bizarre little min-maxy things you can do every single time you hit Umbra Ice, because you have to pay attention to how quickly your mana tick occurred, and if your mana tick is slow to arrive, wait until it's been at least 1.30 or so seconds since your last mana tick before beginning your Fire III cast. It gets even weirder if you have a Firestarter proc, because then Fire III is instant cast, and you have to make a decision about your ability to fit a Blizzard I inbetween Thunder II and Transposed Fire III (or even a Scathe in rare situations to prevent Animation Lock on Transpose for getting 0.8s faster). And all this bizarre little timing and waiting variable intervals mini-game has to be done while dealing with other mechanics.

So yes, you're right, it is a fixed rotation, but it's not really rote memorization, at least if you're in pursuit of maximizing your performance, because of the huge amount of timing involved. Your rotation changes every time based on where your mana tick lands. It's a lot of fun, it's very dynamic, it requires paying a lot of attention and adjusting in response to mana tick timing, and it's a fun change of pace from rotation or proc based DPSing. It has given me a high interest in a possible theoretical class that has to wait short gaps of variable durations up to 3 seconds between moves, and accurately time them, in order to achieve maximum DPS. It's a lot more interesting than the standard rotation where you can mindlessly queue the next move without thinking. I doubt it'd ever be put in a game, because too many people wouldn't want to play something like that, but I think it'd be a delightful mental challenge, and always welcome new things that make the game harder for me.